what is it?

What distinguishes a blog/vlog from any other website? So someone very dear to me who is a videoblogger told me that one major thing is that the blog/vlog allows, invites, encourages viewer to comment. It encourages interaction between the creator and the viewer. Is that the defining point? Are there other things that makes blog/vlog distinct? Another thing he pointed out was that the format of a blog/vlog makes it easy for changes/updates to be made. Content additions push old content down the page. Easy of content modification, a format for content management, doesn't seem to be a satisfactory definition for what makes blog/vlogs distinct. There seems to be something about the fact that the visitors and the creators can interact.

lenny kravitz and injuries

there's a halloween party tonight at my friend's house. I have decided this year to go as Lenny Kravitz. I think I finally have the outfit but sporting the right walk and the short juicy bouncy afro is a harder than I expected. It is really hard to be a sexy black man who knows he is sexy... especially since I have no butt to speak of and shiny black stick straight hair.

I have been really sick for the past few days and super fatigued. In one of my days of rest, I needed to go out to the supermarket to get some food. As I was crossing the street a large SUV was sitting at the corner waiting to make a right hand turn. Before I could make it midway past the SUV, the engine starts. I stick my hand out and yell, "HEY!". The driver, however, was looking at the road of on-coming traffic and continued to speed up. It connected with my outstretched hand before it stopped. I was pretty pissed off and mostly still stunned and dazed. So I quickly crossed the street and kept giving the driver dirty looks. So, that was about two days ago. Starting yesterday, my wrist has been hurting quite a bit and I have immobilized it in my wrist guard.

So I will be an injured Lenny Kravitz tonight.

haikus of today

Haiku #1
cold wet rain drip drop drip drop
monotonous time
slip slide down the window

Haikus #2
dream of lobbing your clothes down
Yo no comprende
I sit here watching you move

Haikus #3
the bus undoes every good.
sickness permeates
longing to get out of here

Ugh!

Today is zombie themed.
There was a zombiecon today. zombies touring NYC, meeting up, eating up and checking things out. At 6 pm, there was supposed to be a zombie protest. My husband went to try to get some footage of it but the zombies were late. Just like a zombie! They have no sense of priorities.
I am sick today and feel like zombie. I spent the whole virus-filled afternoon trying to watch Eyes of Tammy Faye. It wasn't as funny or poignantly sad as I thought it was. I do have to say, I did learn a lot and now know why the gay community loves Tammy- she loves them. She was one of the first televangelist to love them. She was a big proponent of "God loves everyone." I wonder how she would feel about a zombie. Would God love a zombie?

going buggy

This summer, my husband and I had an opportunity to meet and get to know bedbugs. Additionally, right before i moved to my new apartment, they decided that they liked me and moved into my furnishings and/or clothing. For a while, I woke up morning after morning with a whole collection of new welts on my body (at the peak, over 40). I was starting to look like I had the chicken pox again. Since the exterminator would cost about $1200, I decided to take it into my own hands. I obsessed over every piece of information I could find about them and searched for ways I could get rid of them. They are hard to kill and find. After four days of taking apart and spraying all the wooden furniture in my bedroom, sterilizing all washable clothing, wrapping all nonwashables in black plastic to be baked in the sun and hermetically sealed everything I owned, I thought I was done. I moved, and tentatively unpacked- hoping that the buggers were gone. Okay, so that was at the beginning of Septemeber. During September, every two or three days, I would notice a red welt or two pop up but they would not stay long (the old ones lasted at least a week). I stopped obsessing with the hope that the population was small enough (N=1) that they would not be able to reproduce effective and start a colony. Eventually, those bites seemed to stop too. Heartened by this, two weeks ago I opened my last hermetically sealed boxes and fully unpacked.

Bad news, the occassional bites are back. I can feel the obsession coming on as I sit scratching and typing. My only hope is that their frequency does not increase.

new apartment sounds

I have only been in this apartment for about month and am slowly getting used to the new sounds of my neighborhood and building complex. Tonight, a child was screaming at the top of his lungs for a good twenty minutes. I could pick out some "No's" and the such but couldn't really make out what the kid said.

I came home at 6 this evening to really loud hiphop dance music from my neighbor's apartment- hoping that it would not stay on very long. The funny thing is a few weeks ago, my neighbor introduced himself to me in a neighborly way and mentioned that if his kids were making too much noise, I should let him know. Should I let his kids know when their poppa is making too much noise?

I woke up at 3 am this morning to whirring, chopping sounds of a very large vehicle approaching. I thought it was a train but was totally weirded out by the fact that the train sounded like it was headed straight for my third-floor apartment, located a mile or so away from the train tracks. I finally got up and found out that the noise maker looked a lot like a Huey chopper plane with a really bright search light probing my neighborhood. It kept flying towards and away from my building. At 3am, I had flash backs to 9/11 and thought that this was what the folks in the World Trade Center must have heard. What was that aircraft doing? It didn't seem like the kind of thing underfunded local police would have. It must be part of the federal government. Who are they looking for? What kind of a neighborhood am I living in?
Will Big Brother show himself to me one day?

First post evah!

Started to think that since I have been spending so much time on-line these days ogling other vlogs and blogs, I should explore what it is like to create (and keep) a blog. If I get up enough gumption (really money is the issue) I'll get a camera and start posting video too. My husband has been doing it a lot and has really sucked me into the vlogging world.

I work a lot with teachers and researchers and have been thinking much about how to use blogs to create dialog among the two different groups. Teachers are really isolated and it seems that blogging...or more specifically vlogging, might be a good way for teachers to connect with like-minded people.

Haven't quite figured out yet how to do that. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear about them.